Stories at birth, before birth, every moment of our lives to the end. We breathe telling tales. And then what happened? The story ends? The story never ends. We are immortal. We are myth. We remember. — Norbert Blei (August 23, 1935 – April 23, 2013)

Your coop in the woods, so like you, stacked floor to ceiling precious books unfinished manuscripts correspondence from friends a million compelling projects. You had a bucket list decades long, driven by intense urgency. So many things to do, to learn to write to teach and, always, to challenge. So many conversations to savor, seasons to welcome, seasons to weather in your beloved Door. You used to wish me: Nazdar! Be well! Now I pledge to you: Na shledanou! Until we see each other again.

I knew Norb through his articles in the Chicago Tribune during the late 60’s and early 70’s. I was in high school and college, and this man’s writing made that kind of impact on me. I had always wondered what happened to him, since his byline disappeared from the paper. (Of course, that’s when he moved up to Door County.) In 2003, in preparation for my first trip to the Door, I eventually came to The Clearing’s website. Scanning the list of classes, I clicked on Writing Workshop — and there was Norb! I immediately emailed him, asking if he was available to meet with me to discuss my possibility of attending his class that next summer. That weekend we met over a beer, and talked of both his class and of “the old neighborhood.” You see, my grandparents and parents – and large extended family – are from Cicero, Illinois, the ethnic Czech/Bohemian/Polish culture so beautifully captured in Norb’s Tribune articles and book, Neighborhood. Since then, I have had the opportunity to be in several of his classes and a couple of weekend workshops up on Washington Island. I knew from the minute I saw his picture on that Clearing website, I had been given a second chance. And I took it.

To leave this world with a perpetually unfinished long list of things you still want to do — and no unfinished business with the people in your life…well, I think that’s the way to go. — Paula Kosin

Ralph Rausch – Photo taken from the back cover “Adventures in an American’s Literature by Norbert Blei – The Ellis Press, 1982

They came to remember; they came to praise; they came to celebrate a man; they came to celebrate this place, and they came to remember the man who described what a special place it was as it was becoming what it is — often with alarm, always with love.

Saturday was a beautiful Door County day, the gardens at Peninsula Players Theatre were growing lush in the early summer sun, and the highways were comfortably filled with travelers on their way to a destination and friends coming here to pay tribute to Norbert Blei, who died April 23 at age 77.

As the Rev. Michael Brecke put it, Blei was a newspaperman, teacher, artist, poet, and critic, “calling us to task when we stopped loving the land and the water in this place,” and a writer.

“He wrote about the characters in this place and then became one,” said Brecke, who also noted Blei’s gravestone reads, “Find me in my books.”

And for an hour or so, they did: Each of the speakers who shared personal experiences about how he had moved their lives also read a bit from his books.

When Tim Stone first came to Door County, he was told by the locals that “if we ever had a prayer of being one of them, we had to read his books.”

And in Blei’s books they found wisdom — Robert Zoschke read “It’s good to pause now and then and see where the hell you were at” and advice not just for writers but all of us — “the important thing is to get the work done.”

They spoke of the man who would write in his converted chicken coop and teach about the writer’s passion at the Clearing and sit at the counter at Al Johnson’s with a cup of coffee, listening and talking.

“I know that there is a coffee table in heaven and I know that they may have a seat for Norb, but I’m sure he’ll elbow his way in and take over in a short time,” said Annika Johnson, who brought along one of the family’s goats named Beelzebub.

“I love his words, I love his voice, I love his mustache,” Julian Hagen said simply before launching into his song “Northern Light,” and Jeanne Kuhns sang “A Song for Norb,” and Pete Thelen and Jay Whitney led a rousing rendition of Robert Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago” adopted to Door County.

Stone noted that when the Clearing was struggling for survival in 1985, Blei wrote an article for the Chicago Tribune, “Door County’s Clearing: A Secret School in the Woods for Adults,” the reservations began to come in and Jens Jensen’s amazing vision was secured for another generation. There was much talk about the iconic teacher who worked hard to prepare his classes and stayed late at the Clearing to give each aspiring writer personal attention.

But then Bridget Buff came up, and her voice struggled against the tears as she talked about the man who would read to her as she sat in his lap, and make enormous breakfasts and walk her to the bus stop, and mail letters to her even when they lived in the same house, and how “he loved winter and I did not.”

And that was when we remembered the legendary icon was also a man who loved his daughter and his son Christo. The poet who captured the soul and the people of Door County was also a daddy; in fact Norb Blei first came here in 1969 to give them a special place to grow up.

“His home, his heart and his spirit are here forever, and he wouldn’t have it any other way,” Bridget said.

I’ve got things to do today, but I find it hard to start on any one of them before first getting this out of my system, if that is possible to do with a few words. But, it’s the best way, for now.

When word came that Norbert Blei passed away yesterday morning, an event many knew was only a matter of days, even hours in coming, a sense of peace came over me. He had struggled with life itself these past months and seemed frustrated at not having his energy back to do the many things he had started or mentally committed to doing.

Thinking back on what grabbed me most about Norb, it was his passion for taking on more than he should, or could do at one time, then quickly building enthusiasm for his next project. And sometimes it was “their” project, or my project, not necessarily his own. He was not a fence-rider or wall flower. He had both feet in, at once, and something about this rubbed off on me, his need to get on with what seems to reside deeply within in order to provide an avenue for expression.

He was both friend and teacher, not that he taught me in any formal sense, and not that we often got together to visit. But, when we did visit the conversation flowed easily and his eyes lit up over nearly any topic, and he became both teacher and friend. Even when his emotion was disgust or anger, his eyes brightened and his words flowed until the subject changed, then he started on the new topic. He was quiet, thoughtful and compassionate, too, but it was the way in which expressed passion for where he lived, and the people he came in contact with, the literature he was reading at the moment, that sticks with me.

As for teacher? I never received a critique from him, never any comment specific enough to make me want to start over or head in a new direction. A few questions from Norb seemed enough. In this unassuming way, he pointed me in new directions and gave me resolve to try harder and dig deeper.

I wouldn’t be writing this piece today – or any essay for that matter – if it weren’t for his silent encouragement, the idea that it is possible for me to write and publish. Write to make a difference, and write to give expression to ideas. There was that pair of dark eyes, and a soft voice muffled by mustache, over my shoulder then, as now. He became a comforting critic, a voice inside my head.

In recent years Norbert took photos and posted them. Some of his photos were excellent, others ordinary, but each showed he was on the job, still working, still an observer. These mostly arrived on my computer screen without words, other than his one-line description. A noticeable loss of energy was seen in those photos, but he still satisfied an urge to be out there, using all of his senses to connect with those he knew – and they were hundreds, if not thousands, in internet terms. On line, this teacher of poetry and literature had a huge audience.

On this day I choose a photo of hundreds of ducks along the shore of Detroit Harbor, remnants of ice still lingering here and there. I think it might look this way in Europe Lake today, too, near Norb’s home, or wherever he drove on his morning rounds when thinking about this place, the seasons and the cycles of life that take place in and around us.

My file photos of Norbert are from the past two years, a time when he was either sick or recovering from serious illness, and they won’t do justice to this man of vigor, energy and quickness. Instead, I’ll retain his image, a vital Norbert Blei with his quiet voice, in my head. -Dick Purinton, Wednesday, April 24, 2013

The Norbert Blei Literary Award was created to honor the life and works of Norbert Blei, one of the Midwest’s leading authors and teachers of literature, who resided in Door County Wisconsin. Norbert loved both short stories and poetry and this contest features categories in each of these genre.

GUIDELINES:

Please submit a cover letter with the author’s name, mailing address, phone number, e-mail and a 50- to 100-word biography.

Include on the cover page whether you are entering in the SHORT STORY or POETRY category.

Short stories should be double spaced in simple 12-point font and not more than 5,000 words. The author’s name should NOT appear on each page as the judges use a blind judging process.

Poetry submissions should include three poems with one poem per page, preferably in Microsoft Word. The author’s name should NOT appear on the pages of the poems as the judges use a blind judging process.

No previously published work will be considered.

Submit entries digitally to keyjmy@aol.com by July 1, 2015. Please include a check for $15 made out to the Trueblood Performing Art Center and mail it to P.O. Box 136, Washington Island, WI 54246.

Please note that winners are required to attend the festival and read from their work.

Entries will not be returned. The first-place winners will be notified by mail and e-mail approximately one month before the 2015 Washington Island Literary Festival. First-place awards in each of the two categories –SHORT STORY and POETRY — include a cash prize of $250 as well as lodging, meals and admission fees for the 2015 festival. Winners are requested to read their entry at the festival or to designate a reader for the festival. Winning entries remain the property of the author and may be submitted for publication by literary journals by the festival committee upon permission of the author. The judges also may choose to designate honorable mentions.

JUDGES:

Judith Barisonzi of Rice Lake, will judge the Short Story submissions. Now retired from a career as Associate Professor of English, Judith graduated from Radcliffe College, earned her MA and Ph.D at UW-Madison, then taught at Madison Business College, UW Oshkosh and UW Colleges, 1971 – 2005. She has been a traveling lecturer for the WI Humanities Council, is published in a variety of academic reviews and scholarly publications as well as fiction and poetry, and has received awards for her work in both poetry and fiction from the Wisconsin Academy Review and the Muse prize from the WI Fellowship of Poets.

Jean Feraca studied poetry with Donald Hall while earning her M.A. at the University of Michigan where she won two Hopwood awards and began publishing her work in national magazines. Declared “the most promising poet of her generation,” Jean won the Discovery Award in 1975. Author of three books of poetry, Crossing the Great Divide was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wisconsin Arts Board and won the August Derleth Non-fiction award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers for her memoir, I Hear Voices. Jean is well known to public radio listeners, now retired after many years hosting her own program on Wisconsin Public Radio.

Over 25 years ago, a now-defunct tabloid gave writer Norbert Blei (1937-2013) his own ‘bloody pulpit’ to “write whatever he wanted, unedited and uncensored,” in the words of the publisher. For a brief moment, local journalism mattered more deeply to Door County residents than anyone could have imagined.

In the fall of 1988, Norbert Blei was a decorated writer who claimed bylines in the Chicago Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal, and the Washington Post, but the man who wrote from the cozy confines of an Ellison Bay chicken coop no longer had a microphone in his own community. Nearly a decade had passed since he had fallen out with the Door County Advocate when he reached an agreement to write a weekly column for Lon Kopitzke’s weekly shopper, the Door Reminder.

It would take him less than four months to wear out his welcome. His first Blei At Large column was published Oct. 3 1988, his last on Jan. 24, 1989.

It was a time of transformation for Door County. It seemed each sunrise brought the groundbreaking of a new condominium, shopping center, or gallery. Blei, who fled Chicago in 1969 and retreated to the remotest of wooded cabins in Ellison Bay, was not enthusiastic about the county’s economic development.

He saw the arrival of condominiums as a death knell, a scourge from which the peninsula would never recover. But his criticisms didn’t end with developers. Blei attacked the influx of new galleries dotting the villages and spewed vitriol at anything that upset his rustic vision of the county – a purple building, a bright blue newspaper box hinged to mailboxes (the Bluebonic Box Plague), or, really, just about anything new.

He became a vocal, angry, scathing critic of the changes afoot and the businesses and people behind them. Not surprisingly, Blei’s broadsides created problems for Kopitzke’s weekly shopper, as advertisers pulled out and Kopitzke’s personal relationships suffered strain.

With his bottom line suffering, Kopitzke devised a way to deal with the problem without actually having to deal with the problem. He put it to a vote – should Blei’s column stay, or should it go?

Before Norb died in April 2013, I talked to him at length about the about the controversy that captivated the peninsula and garnered write-ups in the Denver Post, Milwaukee Journal, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and other publications across the country. On a long September afternoon in his coop in September of 2012, Blei still found the episode as hilarious – and enraging – as he did 24 years earlier.

I also caught up with Kopitzke and Steve Grutzmacher, owner of Sister Bay’s now-shuttered Passtimes Books and the man who would take Blei’s place at the Reminder. Here’s the story of Blei’s scorched-earth assault on the Door, in their words.

Lon Kopitzke approached Blei about writing a column for him, and the writer was intrigued – but he’d agree only with certain conditions.

Lon Kopitzke: We came to a mutual agreement – I agreed to pay him a certain amount each week, and he could write whatever he wanted, unedited and uncensored.

Norb Blei: Lon Kopitzke, he didn’t know what I was doing. I could just fly. I got away with murder there.

Steve Grutzmacher (at the time, a Door Reminder ad salesman): His writing in the Reminder was very different from his writing at the Advocate. He created an angry voice he utilized to rile things up, particularly things he perceived were wrong with Door County. Norb was making very valid points. For years Norb kind of functioned as the conscience of Door County. He was the only person out there raising many of the concerns, giving voice to it to a wider audience.

Blei mocked businesses by referring to them with thinly veiled pseudonyms, like the Dontwanna Theater (the Donna), the Aggravate (the Door County Advocate), or Les B. Greedy, his moniker for then-Chamber president Bob Hastings, who Blei ridiculed for wanting to extend the tourism season.

SG: In good rhetorical tradition, writing inflammatory prose is fine if the next week you write a straight essay to reinforce the point. Norb never did that. Norb relished being the angry voice and he relished the attention that it got him.

NB: I enjoyed the ride.

SG: In his heyday when he was stirring up all the controversy, I don’t think that Norb ever really grasped the big picture, what the economic realities of Door County were, in the sense that we have to have tourists and they have to come in the summer. All the things he loves about Door County only exist because we get the tourists in the summer. I don’t think Norb fully appreciated that.

“Begin with a freeze on all building within the county, all property sales, all residential, commercial, and public planning immediately. The next logical move would be to turn the whole county over to Nature Conservancy and let that fine organization save us from ourselves.” – Norb Blei, Shut the Damned Door

NB: When the first condo went up in Ephraim, I made some comments. I was naïve enough to think that there were enough people in the county that could see the threat out there in terms of cracking the golden egg. Out and out raw tourism was what killed me. Then it was the condo craze, then it was shops and galleries galore. And I thought this place was a lot more than that. I tried to point out the places that people didn’t pay attention to. I would have to go the extreme to get people to wake up. Obviously we can’t get rid of the galleries, but where should they be, what kind, what’s the quality?

LK: He was ripping the Chamber of Commerce to a point, and some of the personnel even. It was very hard. I could hardly wait to see what he was going to write. Then sometimes I had doubts if we could actually go through with it because it was so outrageous. There were all kinds of people wondering what kind of outlandish things he would write that particular week.

NB: Lon claimed he was losing advertisers because of what I wrote.

LK: In most cases, the people I spoke to face-to-face were probably supporting him. But the people who were opposed to him wouldn’t tell me directly; they would just cancel their ad.

SG: It reached a point where not just one or two advertisers were telling Lon they were pulling their ads, it was a cascade of advertisers pulling ads and threatening to pull their ads. I’m not sure that Norb ever believed there were all these advertisers pulling. It was a ton (I was there at the time). And it was a shopper! It was all about ads, period.

Kopitzke says he suggested to Blei that he do more than criticize, that he put legitimate ideas on the table to add credibility to his argument. He refused.

NB: A writer has enough to do just trying to get his words out there and past people like Dave Eliot [publisher of the Peninsula Pulse and Door County Living, for whom Blei wrote briefly] and other editors. I always take my hat off to people who work on committees. The thing is I cannot do that. I will not do that. I don’t have the time. Ed Abbey was the same way. You weren’t going to find him on an environmental council. That’s your mission. You write the bomb and say, all right you guys, you take care of it.

SG: He never felt it was his position. He has the perverse notion that it is solely his responsibility to raise public awareness as a writer and a journalist, not to actively do anything about them himself. He came out of the news desk at the City News Bureau in Chicago. I’m not saying he’s wrong in this necessarily. Mike Royko was never actively involved in trying to correct problems he wrote about, but it’s a different approach than we’re used to in Door County. We have the good fortune of having people willing to get involved. For old-school journalists the responsibility was to report, and allow other people to take the next steps and then report on that.

Kopitzke began feeling pressure from advertisers and friends about Blei’s column, but he insists there wasn’t much he could do to change Blei’s style. Kopitzke added a disclaimer to Blei’s columns to distance the publication from Blei, which the writer hated. When Blei introduced a fictional secretary, a former porn star named Lovta DuMore X, to answer reader letters, Kopitzke received complaints from clergymen and threats of boycotts.

LK: I personally agreed with a lot of what he wrote, but in some cases, like when he was ripping Christianity, well I couldn’t understand that. I let him know when something was over the top, but it didn’t stifle him in the slightest. He was his own man and he was going to write what he wanted.

SG: Norb never makes it easy for people to work with him, never has. Lon was never able to grow past the notion that no matter how hard you try not everybody is going to love you. Lon couldn’t bring himself to outright fire Norb, so he had a vote.

LK: I never talked to him about stopping his column. I didn’t want to have that conversation with him. So I decided to have a vote, but he didn’t know about the ballot until it came out in print.

Dear Norb, with pen in hand, you should be considered armed and dangerous. – Lon Kopitzke, in his column announcing the vote on Norb Blei’s column

The final tally had 171 votes for keeping Blei, and 221 against.

SG: I don’t know who tabulated that vote. I’m not sure it ever was counted, but the upshot for the Reminder was that Norb was voted out.

LK: I counted them. But of course, I already had my mind made up. That’s when the letters started coming. They were pissed off that he was gone. A lot of people who didn’t much like what he wrote about still found him so provoking that they loved his style. He just went too far sometimes.

Kopitzke and Blei barely spoke in the years to follow.

LK: It’s been a long time. In fact, if I don’t speak first I don’t think he’d speak to me at all. At the time he was just pissed off. I guess there wasn’t too much to discuss.

More than two decades after Blei earned Door County’s most famous firing, a reading of his columns still shocks. It’s not surprising that Blei/ AT LARGE didn’t last.

But many of his predictions proved prophetic. It’s too bad we didn’t listen more closely – or perhaps it’s too bad Blei turned so many people off. In one column he criticized the development of the Country Walk Mall in Sister Bay.

The future is not the shopping mall… The future is the rediscovery of Main Street U.S.A. – Norb Blei, The Do/Remind and its Hired Gun Talk Turkey, 1988

Twenty-five years later the Village of Sister Bay is still trying to lure investment back to the downtown corridor where the grocery store, furniture store, and other businesses once thrived.

SG: Much of what Norb put out there was just fighting change, not accepting that things change. People retire and come up here and think Door County isn’t supposed to change, that we should never change a single thing until they die.

Blei, the Chicagoan, became Door County’s chronicler, most famously with his book, “Door Way.” It’s an ode to the characters of the peninsula, to the people so often overlooked.

Blei was historian, critic, rabble-rouser, and begrudging promoter. But because of his unwillingness to compromise (some would say listen), he burned, no, torched bridges at every publication he worked for – the Door County Advocate, the Door Reminder, the Peninsula Pulse.

As a result, the county’s pre-eminent writer found himself without a willing publisher for much of his Door County career. Could he have made a bigger difference had he toned it down a bit, given people a little slack, and tried to see things through other people’s eyes at least a bit?

From his seat in that cluttered chicken coop, surrounded by stacks of unfinished writings, books, magazines and old newspapers, Blei reflected on those opportunities lost, coming close to humility for a moment.

NB: I’ve thought about that, but you make too many compromises. I could have contributed so much good writing through the Advocate and the Pulse, but I cannot do it with people who don’t trust me. [Blei was not a fan of editors, particularly those he doesn’t believe have his level of knowledge, which was pretty much all of them.] You know what’s the best newspaper in the county – the Washington Island Observer. They got their sense of community, they know what their stories are, they know what their people are.

Today, Blei admits that he wasn’t right about everything.

NB: Regret? I’m sure I said some harsh things about people or businesses that I didn’t have the right to do that. I don’t regret anything I said about the Reminder. Lon was a decent guy but I felt he was in over his head. Over time I realized they did the right thing with the Ephraim Condominiums, which I criticized heavily at the time. They put it set back, away from the water. I don’t regret going after condos, but I realize that that one was a much better building than the ones that were to come.

What surprised me is this. I always thought these things would be the death of the county, and yet, the county survives. That’s the one lesson of all this time. The thing that surprised me is that in spite of all this stuff, there’s an essential core to this landscape that seems almost untouchable. If I want to get away from it all, I know just what roads to find. The center of the county remains. It’s never been developed. There’s the island. People are still doing dumb things, like buying 60 acres and putting up a home, but we’ve got more people from the city with a higher consciousness that appreciate this place.

I’ve always been trying to make people see what they have here.

Working in a converted chicken coop north of Ellison Bay, the late writer Norbert Blei chronicled Door County, Wisconsin through the lives of its inhabitants for over 40 years. A newly-revised edition of DOOR WAY: The People in the Landscape, the first book in Blei’s “Door Series,” was published this past June 2013 by Ellis Press. Books by Norbert Blei are available at Peninsula Bookman (Fish Creek), Main Street Market (Egg Harbor), Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant (Sister Bay) and The Pioneer Store (Ellison Bay). To read the original Blei At Large columns described in this article, pick up a copy of Chronicles of a Rural Journalist in America, available from bookseller Charlie Calkins (262.894.6572, email: wibooks@yahoo.com).

other Norbert Blei web pages

The coop has flown

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Norbert Blei | 1935 – 2013

On the back roads of Door County again

Norbert Blei – 2012

Photo by Bobbie Krinsky

Norbert Blei – 2012

Photo by Jeffrey Winke

Norbert Blei – 2011

Photo by Sharon Auberle

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